Company Man

Guest-room gambits.

Though there’s an industry built on telling you otherwise, there are few real joys to middle age. The only perk I can see is that, with luck, you’ll acquire a guest room. Some people get one by default when their kids leave home, and others, like me, eventually trade up, and land a bigger house. “Follow me,” I now say. The room I lead our visitors to has not been hastily rearranged to accommodate them. It does not double as an office or a weaving nook but exists for only one purpose. I have furnished it with a bed rather than a fold-out sofa, and against one wall, just as in a hotel, I’ve placed a luggage rack. The best feature, though, is the private bathroom.

“If you prefer a shower to a tub, I can put you upstairs in the second guest room,” I say. “There’s a luggage rack up there as well.” I hear these words coming from my puppet-lined mouth and shiver with middle-aged satisfaction. Yes, my hair is gray and thinning. Yes, the washer on my penis has worn out, leaving me to dribble urine long after I’ve zipped my trousers back up. But I have two guest rooms.

The consequence is that, if you live in Europe, they attract guests, lots of them. People spend a fortune on their plane tickets from the U.S. By the time they arrive, they’re broke and tired and would probably sleep in our car if we offered it. In Normandy, where we used to have a country place, any visitors were put up in the attic, which doubled as Hugh’s studio and smelled of oil paint and decaying mice. It had a rustic cathedral ceiling but no heat, meaning it was usually either too cold or too hot. That house had only one bathroom, wedged between the kitchen and our bedroom. Guests were denied the privacy a person sometimes needs on the toilet, so twice a day I’d take Hugh to the front door and shout behind us, as if this were normal behavior, “We’re going out for exactly twenty minutes. Does anyone need anything from the side of the road?”

That was another problem with Normandy: there was nothing for our company to do except sit around. Our village had no businesses in it, and the walk to the nearest village that did was not terribly pleasant. This is not to say that our visitors didn’t enjoy themselves—just that it took a certain kind of person, outdoorsy and self-motivating. In West Sussex, where we currently live, having company is a bit easier. Within a ten-mile radius of our house, there’s a quaint little town with a castle in it and an equally charming one with thirty-seven antique stores. There are limestone-speckled hills one can hike up, and bike trails. It’s a fifteen-minute drive to the beach and an easy walk to the nearest pub.

Guests usually take the train from London, and before we pick them up at the station I remind Hugh that, for the duration of their visit, he and I will be playing the role of a perfect couple. This means no bickering and no contradicting one another. If I am seated at the kitchen table and he is standing behind me, he is to place a hand on my shoulder, right on the spot where a parrot would perch if I were a pirate instead of the ideal boyfriend. When I tell a story he has heard so often he could lip-synch to it, he is to pretend to be hearing it for the first time, and to be appreciating it as much as or more than our guests are. I’m to do the same, and to feign delight when he serves something I hate, like fish with little bones in it. I really blew this a few years back, in Normandy, when his friend Sue came for the night and he poached what might as well have been a hairbrush. Blew it to such an extent that after she left I considered having her killed. “She knows too much,” I said to Hugh. “The woman’s a liability now and we need to contain her.”

His friend Jane has seen some ugliness as well, and though I like both her and Sue, and have known them for going on twenty years, they fall under the category of Hugh’s guests. This means that though I play my role, it’s not my responsibility to entertain them. Yes, I offer the occasional drink. I show up for meals, but can otherwise come and go at my leisure, exiting, sometimes, as someone is in the middle of a sentence. My father has done this all his life. You’ll be talking to him and he’ll walk away—not angry, but just sort of finished with you. I was probably six years old the first time I noticed this. You’d think I’d have found it hurtful, but instead I looked at his retreating back thinking, We can get away with that? Really? Yippee!

Three of my sisters visited us in Sussex last Christmas, so Gretchen and Amy took a guest room each. We gave Lisa the master bedroom and moved next door to the converted stable I use as my office. One of the things Hugh noted during their stay was that, with the exception of Amy and me, no one in my family ever says good night. Rather, they just leave the room—sometimes halfway through dinner—and reappear the following morning. My sisters were considered my guests, but because there was a group of them and they could easily entertain one another I was more or less free to go about my business. Not that I didn’t spend time with them. In various pairings, we went on walks and bike rides, but otherwise they sat in the living room talking, or gathered in the kitchen to study Hugh at the stove. I’d join them for a while, and then explain that I had some work to do. This meant going next door to the stable, where I’d switch on my computer and turn to Google, thinking, I wonder what Russell Crowe is up to?

One of the reasons I’d invited these three over—had gone so far as to buy their tickets—was that this felt like a last hurrah. Except for my brother Paul, who has no passport but tells me with great certainty that, according to an electrician he met on a job site, it is possible to buy one at the airport, we are all in our fifties now. Health-wise, we’ve been fortunate, but it’s just a matter of time before our luck runs out and one of us gets cancer. Then we’ll be picked off like figures at a shooting gallery.

I’d counted the days until my sisters’ arrival, so why wasn’t I next door, sitting with Hugh in our perfect-couple sixteenth-century kitchen, with its stone floor and crackling fire? Perhaps I worried that if I didn’t wander off my family would get on my nerves, or—far more likely—I would get on theirs, and our week together wouldn’t be as ideal as I’d told myself it would be. As it was, I’d retreat to my office and spend some time doing nothing of consequence. Then I’d head back into the house and hear something that made me wish I’d never left. It was like walking into a theatre an hour after the picture has started, thinking, How did that kangaroo get his hands on those nunchakus?

One of the stories I entered late concerned some pills my sister Gretchen had started taking a year and a half earlier. She didn’t say what they were prescribed for, but they were causing her to walk and eat in her sleep. I saw this happen the Thanksgiving before last, which we spent together in a rented house in Hawaii. Dinner was served at seven o’clock, and around midnight, an hour or so after she’d gone to bed, Gretchen drifted out of her room. Hugh and I looked up from our books and watched her enter the kitchen. There she took the turkey out of the refrigerator and started twisting off meat with her fingers. “Why don’t you get a plate?” I asked, and she looked at me, not scornfully, but blankly, as if it had been the wind talking. Then she reached into the carcass and yanked out some stuffing. This was picked at selectively, one crouton mysteriously favored over another, until she decided she’d had enough, at which point she returned to her room, leaving the mess behind.

I told her what had happened and she said, “God damn it. I wondered why I woke up with brown stains on my pillow.”

According to the story I came in on late, Thanksgiving had been a relatively good night for Gretchen. One morning a few weeks after the turkey episode, she walked into her kitchen in North Carolina and found on the countertop an open jam jar with crumbs in it. At first, she thought they were from a cookie. Then she saw the overturned box and realized she had eaten one of the nutrition bars that she breaks apart and feeds her painted turtles. These bars are around four inches long and are made of dead flies, pressed together the way Duraflame logs are. “Not only that,” she said. “But when I was through I ate all the petals off my poinsettia.” She shook her head. “I noticed it on the counter next to the turtle-food box, and it was just a naked stalk.”

I returned to my office more convinced than ever that this would be our last Christmas together. I mean, flies! If you’re going to eat your pet’s food in your sleep, why not think preventively, and exchange your turtles for a hamster or a rabbit, something safe and vegetarian. Get rid of the houseplants while you’re at it—starting with the cactus—and lock up your cleaning supplies.

Later that evening, I found the sisters stretched out like cats in front of the woodstove in the living room. “It used to be that whenever I passed a mirror I’d look at my face,” Gretchen said, blowing out a mouthful of cigarette smoke. “Now I just check to see if my nipples line up.”

Oh, my God, I thought. When did that start happening? The last time we were all together for Christmas was 1994. We were at Gretchen’s house, in Raleigh, and she started the day by feeding her bullfrog, who was around the same size as her iron and was named Pappy. He was kept in a murky, heated thirty-gallon aquarium on her living-room floor, next to three Japanese newts, who lived in a meat-loaf pan. It was a far cry from a normal Christmas, but our mother had died a few years earlier. It seemed a good idea to break with tradition and try something completely different: thus my sister’s place, with its feel of a swamp, rather than the house that we had grown up in, and which now felt freighted with too much history. Gretchen’s waist-length hair has gone silver since that Christmas, and when she walks in her sleep she limps a little.

On our first day together in Sussex, we piled into the Volvo and rode to the town with the thirty-seven antique stores. Hugh drove, and I crawled into the way-back, thinking, happily, Here we are again, me and my sisters in a station wagon, just as when we were young. Who’d have thought in 1966 that we’d one day be riding through southern England, none of us having realized the futures we predicted for ourselves. Amy was not the policewoman she’d so hoped to become. Lisa was not a nurse. No one had a houseful of servants or a trained proboscis monkey, yet we’d turned out O.K., hadn’t we?

In one of the antique stores we visited that afternoon, we saw a barrister’s wig. It was foul, all the colors of dirty underpants, but that didn’t stop Amy, and then Gretchen, from trying it on.

“That’s O.K.,” Lisa said when it was handed to her. “I don’t want to get y’all’s germs on my head.”

Their germs, I thought.

The sun set at around four that afternoon, and it was dark by the time we headed home. I fell asleep in the way-back for a few minutes, and, when I awoke, Lisa was discussing her uterus, specifically her fear that its lining might have grown too thick.

“What on earth gives you that idea?” Amy asked.

Lisa then mentioned a friend of hers, saying that if it could happen to Cynthia it could just as easily happen to her. “Or to any of us,” she said.

“And what if it does?” Gretchen asked.

“Then we’ll have to get them scraped out,” Lisa reported.

I lifted my head over the back seat. “What’s a uterus lined with, anyway?” I imagined something sweet and viscous. “Like whatever it is that grapes are made of?”

I later reminded him of the time his sister Anne visited us in Normandy. I walked into the living room after returning from a bike ride one afternoon and heard her saying to her mother, Joan, who was also there, “Don’t you just love the feel of an iguana?”

That same night, after my bath, I overheard her asking, “Well, can’t you make it with camel butter?”

“You can,” Mrs. Hamrick said, “but I wouldn’t recommend it.”

I thought of asking for details—“Make what with camel butter?”—but decided I preferred the mystery. That often happens with company. I’ll forever wonder what my guest Kristin meant when I walked into the yard one evening and heard her saying, “Mini goats might be nice.” Or, odder still, when Hugh’s father, Sam, came to see us in France with an old friend he knew from the State Department. The two had been discussing the time they’d spent in Cameroon in the late sixties, and I entered the kitchen to hear Mr. Hamrick say, “Now, was that guy a Pygmy, or just a false Pygmy?”

I turned around and headed to my office, thinking, I’ll ask later. Then Hugh’s father died, as did his old friend from the State Department. I suppose I could Google “false Pygmy,” but it wouldn’t be the same. I had my chance to find out what one was, and I blew it.

One of Hugh’s greatest regrets is that his father never saw the house in Sussex. It’s the kind of place that was right up Sam’s alley: a ruin transformed in such a way that it still looks pretty beat up. The main difference is that now the wiring is safe, and there’s heat. Mrs. Hamrick visits, though, and sometimes she and Hugh will sit in the kitchen and talk about Sam. It’s not the snippets of conversation that betray him as the subject but, rather, their voices, which, five years after his death, are still brittle and reverential, full of loss and longing. It’s how my sisters and I used to be when talking about our mother. Now, though, after twenty-two years, almost every discussion of her ends with the line “And can you believe she was so young?” Soon, we’ll be sixty-two, the age she was when she got cancer and was killed by it. Then we’ll be even older, which just seems wrong, against nature somehow.

I made up my mind ages ago that I would not let that happen, that I would also die at sixty-two. Then I hit my mid-fifties and started thinking that perhaps I’m being a bit harsh. Since I’ve finally acquired a couple of decent guest rooms, it seems silly not to get a little more use out of them.

When visitors leave, I feel like an actor watching the audience file out of the theatre, and it was no different with my sisters. The show over, Hugh and I returned to the lesser versions of ourselves. We’re not a horrible couple, but we have our share of fights, the type that can start with a misplaced sock and suddenly be about everything. “I haven’t liked you since 2002,” he hissed during a recent argument over which airport security line was moving fastest.

This didn’t hurt me so much as confuse me. “What happened in 2002?” I asked.

On the plane, he apologized, and a few weeks later, when I brought the airport incident up over dinner, he claimed to have no memory of it. That’s one of Hugh’s many outstanding qualities: he doesn’t hold on to things. Another is that he’s very good to old people, a group that in the not too distant future will include me. It’s just this damn middle-aged period I have to get through.

The secret, of course, is to stay busy. So, when the company leaves, I clean their bathrooms and strip their beds. If the guests were mine—my sisters, for example—I’ll sit on the edge of the mattress, and hold their sheets to my chest, hugging them a moment and breathing in their smell, before standing back up and making my rickety way to that laundry room I always wanted. ♦